Abstract:
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and The American Geological
Institute (AGI) announced a cooperative agreement that will focus on
making the USGS Global Geographic Information System (GIS) database
readily available to educators and the general public in the form of a
GIS based world atlas.
This USGS Global GIS database
... contains a wealth of USGS and other
public domain data, including global coverages of elevation,
landcover, seismicity, and resources of minerals and energy at a
nominal scale of 1:1 million. The GIS, which will run on the included
Environmental Systems Research Institute's (ESRI) ArcView Data
Publisher software, will be produced both by region on seven CD-ROM's or on
one DVD.
Detailed Description of Data Sets Included on each volume of the CD-ROM and
DVD (See http://webgis.wr.usgs.gov/globalgis/datasets.htm for additional
details and metadata on each data layer)
Vector Datasets:
-County Political boundaries
-Administrative boundaries
-Major cities
-City Gazetteer
-Large Urban areas (polygons)
-Roads
-Railroads
-Utility lines
-Airfields
-Geologic providence
Geologic age
-Faults
-Ecological Regions
-Perennial rivers
-Small rivers and streams
-Springs, wells, and dams
-Drainage basins
-River basins
-Volcanoes
-Earthquakes
-Ore deposits
-Oil and gas fields
-U.S. national Oil and Gas Assessment
-Mineral deposits and metallogenic belt maps of the Russian Far East
-Mines
-Elevation data
-Climate data (temperature, precipitation, potential and actual
evapotranspiration, cloud coverage)
Raster Datasets:
-Shaded relief
-Landcover
-12 Greenness (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (one for each
month))
-Population
-Lights and night
-Slope
-MODIS Blue Marble True-color satellite image
-Simulated Earth Image
[Summary provided by USGS) 
